Slashdot Mirror
Cracking Down on MP3s at the Office
jhaberman writes "News.com has a story
about how corporations are now starting to crack down on networked MP3's, not
necessarily for the reasons you might think." Talks about legal issues,
as well as bandwidth issues, and the simple issue of employees wasting
their employers time.
There's no reason to have a fileserver full of MP3's on the company dime. These days it's tantamount to having porno on the corporate fileserver.
Luck favors the prepared, darling.
"Some of these corporations, we are told, have their own little networks--that is very clearly illegal."
--RIAA President Cary Sherman
Man, I hope this one was taken out of context!!
And before you accuse me of being a deadbeat "slashbot", I have been both an employee and an employer.
Where I work we're not allowed to download them but they don't care if we have them especially if we show they came from CDs we own.
I can understand it, legal issues, bandwidth and a time waster. Makes sense to me.
The Anti-Blog
But it's my God-given right to download pr0n and MP3s and warez onto my company provided computer! It's in the Constitution!
from the but-i-need-those-tunes-to-live dept.
.... Breathe out .... Breathe in .... Breathe out ...."
CmdrTaco - I think you'll be fine. Last I checked, you're not a blonde female, and your mp3's arent repititions of "Breathe in
I have mp3's at work on my computer because I keep all my CD's at home in a 300 disc changer, and have ripped them all to my mp3 server at home. If I want to listen to an album, I'll download it from my FTP then listen to it for a few weeks before I delete it. It takes me no more time to queue up an album in Winamp than to swap between CD's like other people do at work for music. If I'm not pirating or sharing files, why can't I listen to mp3's?
When I read this, I didn't think it was news, pretty much anyone who has had a professional job can say, yea we aren't supposed to use our work computers for much besides work (Doesn't mean you do always use it for work, you always have some leeway.)
Typically, the RIAA receives tips about alleged illegal file swapping through its anonymous tip line. It then threatens legal action and asks companies to stop. So far, the tactics may be working.
That is what scared me... how BSA like the RIAA is. Anonymous file sharing tip line? So some disgruntled employee anonymously says they traded MP3s and they go after the company. That's just a new low for them.
The key to the enjoyment of pop music is to replace any instance of "love" with "C.H.U.D."
My company takes a hardline view on anything to do with the computers. The IT guy who was running a pirate software and mp3 server was quickly dismissed. And even the few who have installed software have been fired. We don't have the MP3 problem because our computers sound drivers are disabled by admin. If someone was industrious enought to enable them it would be pretty obvious what you did and would quickly be without job.
"Beware the squirrels"
And it's the two usual reasons again.
1. Bandwidth Hogs
2. RIAA on the arse.
Where does it say it's some other reason?
At my workplace, the woman in the cubicle neighboring mine plays Hanson and Bette Midler mp3s off of her personal server on open-air earphones for 5 hours straight. Everyone within a 10 foot radius hates her because of that. Even the boss tells her it's reducing our performance-ever since she set up that server, our productivity and innovation has gone down dramatically. The boss decided to shut down the server to get us back on track, but the RIAA got to him before he had the chance.
:)
We're probably the only people glad that the RIAA is cracking down on businesses with mp3 filled servers.
Sigh. Why doesn't the RIAA just admit that they have found a new business model in the post-mp3 world: it's called extortion.
Ordered a server today - was told not to scrimp. It has about 700GB of diskspace and needs about 50GB.
Networked MP3s is the key here. If you're sharng your collection with people who don't own those CDs, that's illegal. Whether or not it's unethical is an exercise left to the reader, but I don't think anybody can logically debate the legality.
I know the kneejerk reaction is to scream "But MP3 is just a file format!" If what you say is true, that you're not allowing others to access your music, then you have nothing to worry about - you're covered under fair use.
-- "Complacency is a far more dangerous attitude than outrage." -Naomi Littlebear
About two years ago, my employer banned all music at work. I work in an automotive facility--not like where you get an oil change, but like where you get engine blocks bored and stuff. (To be more accurate, it's where prototypes of various machined parts are made for testing and stuff. Also, as a sort of side job, a lot of repair work is done, because there's big money in it. Think about it... make a hole a bit bigger and charge the poor shmoe $400 to do it.) You could say that prior to about two years ago, there were practically "no rules." This meant that in every corner of the facility, employees blasted their stereos with all their favorite music. In one corner of the shop, you heard Metallica, in another, Mozart, and in another yet, that stupid noise that some people call Pop. And there were about twenty other zones like this. At the various computers, which are all connected to the 'net through a LAN, employees downloaded countless songs through every system known to man, whether IRC or through web pages or whatever, and burned these on CDs to play everywhere in the shop. It was commonplace for someone with a computer-related request which takes one minute to fulfill to also ask for whatever songs, which would take about an hour of someone's paid time to find and download. People brought art projects into work--I am NOT kidding! The boss was always running around giving people instructions, because all the data was literally in his head and he didn't empower anybody to make decisions, so while one person had his attention (and twenty others were chasing him around for attention), everybody else was messing around. And somehow (don't even ask me how, because I can't explain this to this day), this company remained very profitable. Probably because a ton of work DID get done (though it was nearly all done in overtime, or by the boss in the middle of the night). The problem was that the company operated at perhaps 10% of the efficiency that it operates at now.
Well, let me get to my story, yo. So the boss, one day, got pissed off because a bunch of jobs had been scrapped, due to errors made by his various employees (40 of them), so he got pissed and banned all music. It's been that way ever since. (Oh yeah, and about two years ago, around the same time as this ban, he brought in a professional management team that understands the business quite well, and this increased profits to nearly twenty times the original amounts. I won't say whether the lack of music had anything to do with it, but I'm trying to say that I can see where these bans on whatever in the workplace come from. Sometimes, you just gotta get shit done.)
When you pay close enough attention, it is possible to find many instances where an activity or behavior is not necessarily the most appropriate allocation of company resources. We could be facist about what activity we allow, though I think it would pollute/dilute the friendly attitude we want to encourage in our employees. I think that it comes down to the corporate environment those that hold purse strings are attempting to foster.
We strictly deny music downloading/streaming/trading over the LAN. There is the legal perspective of licensing and outside pressure (we do pay ASCAP and BMI handsomely in our business) but the real reason is because of the impact it can have on our network and physical system resources (I can't afford to put CD-ROMs in everyone's box just for tunes). However, we encourage listening to whatever helps your specific style of working through a standalone deck so long as it doesn't distract your coworkers. I have some experience in the hospitality industry and I would relate an experience from our kitchens: we feed our employees from our overage in production. It is our experience that when we give to employees there have much less desire to take. Control your shrinkage proactively, so to say.
We expect our employees to give their best effort for greater than one-third of their waking hours, and in return they deserve to be given our best effort to make their experience as positive as possible. I think that the same attitude can apply in many aspects of how you manage your staff, whether it "letting" them listen to music instead of the hum of an HVAC or any other corollary to their day that helps people feel better and accordingly, be better employees.
Go do anything besides sitting in a cube and you'll be lucky if you get to do any of this..
Free Mac Mini
I work for PENNDOT. We are not allowed to browse for personal reasons, or listen to music, period. Why should I be allowed to? I'm at work to work, not to play. Jesus, I'm a teenager and I understand that.
IT workers say the same thing--that the songs are already out of the proverbial jewel box. Like universities, companies may have to learn to live with a certain amount of media on their networks.
For any but the biggest networks this is easy to stop. Institute a policy of NO filesharing programs and NO unauthorised MP3's and Movies's. Do random checks of company computers at night. If contraband is found write them up, and tell them that if found again, they will be fired. Check that employee's machine again after 2 weeks, and one month later. If they resumed doing it, they are an idiot and should be canned. I would imagine after the first employee got canned, this practice would have a tremendous effect. This isn't that hard of a problem to solve.
You are dealing with a limited environment, in which you have physical access to all the machines involved. Every company should do it, if only to save money on bandwidth.
std::disclaimer<std::legalese> sig=new std::disclaimer; sig->dump(); delete sig;
Oh, well, I guess they would be cracking down for the reasons I might think.
[
You are wasting the companies bandwidth by d/l them from home.
Why not just reburn a couple of them and bring them in? CD's are only 10 to 20 cents right now. And it would be much nicer to the company network traffic.
It's unpatriotic. I'll never let them take away my MP3 of "Let the Eagle Soar".
Check out Webplay.
You can set up variable-bitrate streams from your home to your office - then you have no incriminating files left on your office's disks.
For instance, you can listen at 48k during the week during high net usage times or at native bitrates at night or on the weekends.
Even with my iPod, it seems that the song I want to hear is always at home on my server - this solves it nicely.
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
-- My Weblog.
So corporate networks are illegal now thanks to the RIAA.
Please. You and everybody else who read the article can clearly see that your quote about networks being illegal is taken out of context. Let's look at a relevant sentence in the preceeding paragraph:
In April, the RIAA announced a settlement with an Arizona company that allegedly let employees trade MP3 files over an internal network.
If you're ever involved in a debate about the ethics of the RIAA, please do us a favor and don't attempt to fabricate this sort of "evidence." Reasonable people see right through it. Besides, it's not as if you need to make up anything about the RIAA, there's plenty of stuff that they do right out in the open.
-- "Complacency is a far more dangerous attitude than outrage." -Naomi Littlebear
At one point I found a female employee with lesbian porn in her home folder. She was fired.
Wait a second! I hope there was more to that than just finding lesbian porn in a women's file space which were the grounds for her being fired.
I just turned 16. I started my first job 3 weeks ago. I have admin access to every server where I work, and my workstation. I have root on the Linux system that I set up for the company. I simply FTPed to my system at home and downloaded all my oggs. I then installed WinAmp, and everything is fine. My bosses(I have two) are both complementing how hard I work.
What employers need to realize is that things like a dress code, and crummy music hurt job performance. A friend of mine at work can do four times the productivity that he does, but as he says, "I'll give them better work when they treat me better." While I don't doodle and such during work, I do understand where he is coming from.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Taken only slightly out of context:
he said. "Some of these corporations, we are told, have their own little networks--that is very clearly illegal."
I was told somewhere that some companys have their own big networks too. It's amazing how companies set up networks that allow users to share data and increase their productivity. Since there is a potential for them to share mp3 files accross those networks, they must be illegal.
At what point did having a computer at your home or office with a networked connection suddenly make you suspect of illegal activites.
My company already pays the RIAA in various capacitys untold 'royalties' (or whatever they are called) every time we buy CD-Rs for that oh so potentially illegal copying of important business related files for backup purposes. (The fact that we don't use work machines for mp3s has nothing to do with it.. we are suspect).
Now, aparently, if somebody on our work network happens to download and distribute mp3s, we'll get charged again.
Who gave these jokers that kind of power? And what can we do to take it away from them.
The Internet is generally stupid
Maybe a bit nitpicky, but you didn't fire the men with heterosexual porn in their home folders? Isn't that a bit biased?
As an employee I have snatched my fair share of MP3's from the web while at work. Needed something to do waiting for the tech calls to come in and while on the calls :).
The funny thing is that my boss at the time was a funny guy. The first day I went to work and was being processed thorugh HR yada yada, I was sent to the sysadmin(this was at an ISP). He sat me down and handed me what he cooled my toolkit. An employee manual for the techs and an IDE removable drive bay with a five gig drive in and mount brackets.
The drive I was informed was so I could transfer large amounts of data between work and home with ease.
After getting to know him he explained to me it was easier buying a five gigger for every tech to keep his leeched WaRez/Mp3,p0rN, collection on instead of on the company servers. We each had to sign a waiver that the use of the drive was only for business use.... It was an intresting work around. A pretty cool boss. He loved music.
On the other hand as a sysadmin I agree with the legal issues. Keep it off my network. If you listen to music, you better have a job that doesn't recquire you to answer the phone or recquire any aural cues for your post.
I had another boss that didnt mind us listening to music but we all had to pool the cds and vote on them and only listen to one. Good policy.
But if anyone runs in an office with 200 workstations all with labtec speakers grunting out tinny tunes, Garth Brooks, Goo Dolls, Bare Naked, and a hodgepodge of others, is truly a virgin in an industry.
Puto
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
I brought in my own speakers (set of altec lansings), and since I'm in my own little area, I do get the opportunity to turn it up when I feel the need.
Also, I use a minidisc player for my music source. No sense in leaving traces on company equipment -- just use my own property. And, if they ask me to leave it at home, I'd respect that.
Karnal
It does when they put about 4Gb of them in their home directories, you know the ones that get backed up at night and are generally less than 200Mb. And don't say to get more backup capacity, it was the extra length of time required as opposed to storage space that was the problem.
Jaysyn
There is a war going on for your mind.
You really should have posted this anonymously, if you insisted upon posting it at all. If the company's legal department finds out, they'll almost certainly recommend firing you before you get the company's lungs ripped out through its nose with a discrimination lawsuit.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
Click here or here.
Complaining about being yelled at or fired for wasting the company's money and time is like complaining about having to say the pledge of alliegence when your public education is paid for by the government. If you want to listen to and download MP3s on the job, start your own business. While I agree that being able to listen to music while you're working is a good comfort, its not the end of the world if your company bans it. When I went to high school, it was perfectly all right for 20 students in a classroom to watch streaming rap videos in RM format, which choked our measly T3, but it wasn't alright for me to download MP3s and listen to them.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
A female employee was FIRED for having "lesbian porn in her home folder"?! While everyone else's porn was just deleted? I really hope this is way out of context, because otherwise your company are assholes, and sue-able assholes at that. In fact, if you found the lesbian porn and set this all in motion, rather than just deleting it, you are an asshole too. Well, actually I suspect you're just a troll, but the point needs to be made.
Freedom: "I won't!"
I was the unofficial DJ at my last workplace. We all (12 people) sat in a large room, and I'd usually play whatever I was into at the time, trying to mix it up as much as possible, unless someone else brought in a CD for me to play, which took precendence. What made it work so well was that we had a gong policy. Anyone at any time could "gong" a song or album, for whatever reason. It could be a one-time gong (say you're simply not in the mood for it) or a permanent one (if you can't stand the song/CD ). For instance, I played a Johnny Cash CD once, and a coworker came back the next day and said he had "Tennesse Stud" stuck in his head the rest of the day and put a permanent gong on Johnny Cash. So I never played it anymore while he was around.
Basically, music in the workplace can be a double-edged sword. A well-chosen CD can make a hour of hardcore coding at 9 pm go by like nothing. A CD like Hanson can prevent you from doing any work at all, for lack of any spare brain cycles (they're all used up saying "this sucks, this sucks, etc.).
A little goddam common courtesy for your fellow workmates goes a long way. Failing that, "shut that crap off, woman" isn't such a bad idea. Or if you feel like being more polite, just suggest people take turns DJing. Not playing music at all is, IMHO, a poor and counter-productive solution.
c-hack.com |
Our rule was "if you don't understand it, don't mess with it". Except for executives, HR and Finance of course.
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951
"What you really want to do is protect people from themselves," --Frank Gillman (Guy who works at company that makes web filters for adults at work).
Bring on the straight jackets, and urine testing.
The job market's tight. Those who haven't been fired outright (like 16,000 WorldCommers were today) are looking at being replaced by H1Bs or having their jobs outsourced to India or China or God-only-knows where. So of course the PHBs are going to stick it to the workers.
There is no justification for loading a company PC with speakers, a web-cam, a ridiculously oversized drive and a 21" monitor.
The software should all be on one server. The data files should all be on another. These are company assets. They should be treated as such.
Files should be checked-out and only to the user that should be authorized to use/modify them, checked-in again, journaled stored for check-out again and backed up.
What the hell are we doing with multi-media capable machines in an accounting department? Singing spread sheets announcing how deep you're in the red?
What's with all these CD-ROM drives? The files should be on the company server. If they aren't, you don't need them. If you do have IT put 'em there.
NOBODY needs diskette drives anymore.
The PC should consist on one CPU, only enough RAM as required to run the permissible apps, a NIC, a sensible flat screen monitor so it doesn't eat up all the desk space.
Printing, faxing, communication connection, storage are all shared corporate resources and should reside on networked servers.
Who needs Windows with all the damn bells and whistles?
A bare-bones geegaw-less Linux distro with OpenOffice or StarOffice and whatever specialized software tools the each user really needs to do their job, pulled off the LAN, should be all a business allows.
The rest is expensive distractions and productivity sinks.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
From the article:
Some studies have estimated that as many as one in five work computers contains file-swapping software.
Really the percentage is probably more like 99%. Any computer that has a web browser or FTP client has file-swapping software on it.
Again from the article:
RIAA President Cary Sherman.: "Some of these corporations, we are told, have their own little networks--that is very clearly illegal."
And some corporations have large networks. I guess that is even more illegal. Everyone! Disconnect the Ethernet cable, and step away from the computer. Networking computers has been declared illegal by the RIAA.
All that aside, they have a point. Most people do use the network at the office for personal use. This is of course the fault of the IT department. If they lay down a policy that the network is for company business, they should set up equipment and software that enforces those rules.
At Bank One in AZ, they have such a policy (network and Internet acesss for company business only), but the restrictions are applied haphazardly. Joke sites are filtered by the proxy along with sites like Dilbert, The Onion, etc. Software downloads are disallowed, but they allow FTP connections and do not block sites like versiontracker.com or download.com. *shrug*. Perhaps a few settlements/suits will cause companies like this to suddenly crack down and actuall impliment their stated policies. Until that time, I know the employees take the view that if the company where really serious about the policies that the IT department would limit/control the offending behaviour/sites.
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
Dance For Me, My Naughty Lesbians! I have your oils and feathers over here, on this ottoman....
So that's where Worldcom's $3.6 gigabucks went!
I noticed an interesting quirk in Kazaa after using it for a couple of weeks. I turned off Kazaa so I could play Quake. After I connected, I noticed that my ping went from 150 to 230, and that my connection was getting intermittently lagged every few seconds.
:)
I did a little sniffing around and noticed that even though Kazaa was off, lots... and I mean LOTS of people were trying to talk to the port that Kazaa was using. It took about a day for that to calm down.
I can't believe it, I was getting so many people trying to talk to Kazaa that it was affecting my connection! If that happened at work, the network manager would hunt me down. One thing that really sucks (at least where I work...) is that if the connection acts wacky, the bigwigs that sign my check think that it's a failure on my part. Go fig. For some reason I'm supposed to be able to fix the ISP's probs before they notice.
I'm not endorsing music trading being banned, but I do understand why a sysadmin would like to avoid use of such programs. That's before getting into the legality of it. Execs act like not being able to get their email is worse than their car not starting.
Piece of advice to those of you tempted to use Kazaa at work: There's a very good chance that the network admin will come to your desk and ask what you're doing. heh.
I'm curious if anybody has any insight into what's happening here and if it happens on other P2P progs.
"Derp de derp."
by reading this article!
back to work!
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
Is it just me or are they spending a ridiculous amount on these boxes that do the bandwidth limiting? Don't most of the Cisco boxes they're probably using already have most of those capabilities (e.g. limit traffic for this port) anyway.
It seems like someone could whip up a linux box with the same capabilities for $3-5K (including some sort of smart NIC that could filter faster). Up to $49K seems ridiculous. On the other hand, maybe that's what they're doing.
The companies know full well that the machines are multimedia capable: music/porn/jokes/trailers etc enhance productivity; people work better when they have a little fun. So long as its not officially endorsed, and lip service is given to cracking down from time to time, then everybody is happy.
So whats the big deal?
Suppose I am with my roommate in my room and I play a CD on the boom box. My roommate does not own this CD; yet he is able to "share" in the listening of this CD as I play it. Is this illegal?
Suppose my roommate is in another room and I run a speaker wire from my boom box in my room to the speakers in his room. I then play my CD on my boom box. I hear it on the boom box; he hears it on his speakers in his room. Is this illegal?
Suppose I replace the boom box with a 300 disc CD changer that is capable of playing two discs simultaneously. I play one disc on my speakers and I play another disc on his speakers. Is this illegal?
Suppose I replace the 300 disc CD changer with an mp3 server and the speaker wire with a network cable. I play one mp3 on my speakers and another mp3 on his speakers. Is this illegal?
Where do you draw the line of legality? I don't think it's such an open and shut case that local area sharing of mp3s is illegal, especially in light of the provisions in the Audio Home Recording Act that permit noncommercial copying of recorded material in exchange for RIAA taxes on blank media.
I work with a consulting firm, but the office I'm in is down stairs in a suite of our own away from the suits.
For many months we had all gotten used to having tunes playing on the speakers connected to my box (myself and two others split the cost of some cheap Altec Lansing speakers). At first I acquired some mp3s from a coworker upstairs, then later I ripped a bunch of our CDs to OGG and shuttled them to work on CD-RW...
Recently we reorganized our seating arrangement and it left me and another coworker in a room to ourselves. I took the speakers with me since they were connected to the box I was using...
Well, no more than two weeks and my supervisor was franticly trying to come up with a way that he and the ladies in his area could have some music again!
I told him to simply buy some cheap speakers, but he didn't want to at first... Two days later, he gave me $20 to go to the local computer store and get some more cheap speakers for him!
They're happy now! :)
This user account is inactive account replaced by the PDA
I've discovered that its far preferable to run a Shoutcast server from home and stream 128kbit MP3s to my station at work. With a little bit of SSH jiggery and pokery I can get over the blocked port and have access to my full collection of 300+ albums. No need to sully the corporate machines at all.
On the time wasting issue - yesterday, for some unfathomable reason, I couldn't connect to the Stream. Rather than increasing productivity, I found that the absence of music in my working life caused me to become a jibbering wreck. I spent most of the morning frantically trying to debug the problem, and the afternoon planning how I would investigate it when I got home. Music helps me to shut out the monotony and concentrate on the work.
In the immortal words of the Tavares - Don't Take Away The Music!
http://www.davetansley.com - you proba
Let me apologize for making a sarcastic comment you were too stupid to identify. Next time I'll use tags to help you out.
Probably not that kind of lesbian. The girls you're referring to are the sexually confused, so-called bisexuals. Those are the ones you want. Lesbians are the ones you see on ESPN2 playing pool. The ones you're looking for, you'll only find in Girls Gone Wild commercials on TV.
So you should be looking for lesbian porn as well as straight porn on the HD, then it's go time.
Synergy is your friend
I bring or transfer my own MP3's to work. I might waste sometime playing around with them, but it does not bother me one bit. You see, I am not a smoker, and until they stop taking a ten minute break every half hour, then no body has any right to complain to me about five miuntes of fooling around with some music.
Great Linux Site
I'm a software developer in a free-range (read: sans-cubicle) environment -- and headphones allow for a lower interrupt level and fewer distractions. About a dozen of us pitched in for a 60GB drive a year ago and have been filling it with our favorite tunes. We paid for the drive, the bandwidth usage is reasonable, we're all happier and more productive, and everybody wins.
Fortunately mgmt understands this here...
La via sola al paradiso incommincia nel inferno
I do some admin stuff for a 300 employee company in Hamburg, Germany. Ironically, at that location mp3's are welcome.
This is easily explained as follows - there was a general ban on radio receivers. First reason was that it might cause conflicts when people can't agree on a station or two individuals share an office, with one being a person that needs silence to concentrate. The other reason was the simple that fact, that any radio receiver and tv receiver has to be properly registered with out GEZ, an organisation funding the public radio/tv and therefore collecting bucks with anyone owning a receiver. So technically, the cheap receiver in the office might not be registered and therefore illegal. To prevent the general ban was in place.
Then people started to bring in discman's and headphones (the cd drives are config-locked in all boxes, so nothing to gain there). Some employees started bothering management for a solution. Instaling and registering radios for all offices was way out of question. The solution was setting up an old server, equipping it with some employee-sponsoreg large hard disk, and throw that sucker into the server room. Each user got a quote on those networked drives, just for mp3. So the employees could bring in their fav CD from home, have them ripped by the IT dep (cheap scipt utilising FreeCDDB, nearly no manual work) and then stream the files into their OS-supplied media players (although we installed Winamp as well to get rid of the exploit-ridden and memory hungry Redmond products). Sharing of mp3 between users is possible of course, or would you deny lending a co-worker your new CD? The pretty low costs for cheap loudspeakers (where they were not already installed) is a mere fragment of the cost radio receivers would have totaled.
Is that copyright infringement? I think not. And even if it was, it's in the users hands. We made it clear that they had to physically own the CD to have mp3 imported, and that we would not just copy a mp3-filled compact to their folders. So, these people own the CD, but can leave it at home because they have a copy at work. Same thing as having a CD in the living room shelf and car CD changer at the same time - technically it is a rip, legally it is your fair use.
+++ath0
Insofar as the problems with the economy have virtually nothing to do with productivity, I'd say very little. One of the reasons why so many of us have so much slack time is that productivity remains ridiculously high, but people (or at least the middle-class and higher people for whom goods and services are being produced) just aren't buying goods and services.
- Both myself and my coworkers work better with music.
- To get music, we either have to bring in CDs or listen to MP3s.
- CDs require changing them in the drive, whereas MP3s are automatic as long as you have a playlist.
- Therefore, MP3s are more productive because you don't have to stop to switch the CD in the drive.
She bought it, and so we're allowed to continue. Luckily, myself and my coworker have very similar tastes to music, so it works out nicely.Blog,Twitter
There are many types of IT jobs.
I sit here 9 to 5, never travel, enviable salary and perks.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I'm supposed to use this computer for *work*?
Dammit, all I do all day is hit 'reload' on
the Slashdot Explorer program.
- undoware.ca
Labor jobs are tough, no doubt. When I was younger, I worked a couple of summers for an electrical contractor. Much of the time I was actually digging the ditches you mention. In the summer. In south Georgia with nats and 90% humidity.
Absolutely, it sucked. One thing about it, though, my brain never got so overwhelmed with mind numbing details that it wanted to climb out of my skull. When programming it often does.
An article just this morning talks about how IT work sucks the soul right out of a person. At the end of a day digging ditches, you feel good. Tired, yes, but you have whole endorphin rush thing from the exercise, as well as a real feeling of acomplishment. The ditch is dug. You can see it is dug. Nobody is going to come along later and ask you can also make it an email sending ditch with instant messaging. It's a ditch. You know where you stand.
Actually - in 40 states, a lesbian (or any other non-heterosexual) can be fired "just because" they're non-heterosexual, even if they obey every company policy to the letter (well, except for the one marked "all employees must be heterosexual").
I've been wondering: I know Cracker Barrel has such a policy, yet I've seen them in Massachusetts where it would be illegal to discriminate on the basis of orientation... how do they get around that?
For the several replies that questioned the 1/3 waking statement, my thinking was along these lines:
Total hours/year: 8760
Total waking hours/year (as two-thirds of total hours): 5840
Workhours/year: 2000
Ratio, workhours/waking: 0.342465753
Exactly. Sometimes the tracking becomes more expensive than the resource being consumed. A manufacturing company was experiencing shrinkage of certain parts, like screws, nuts and electrical connectors. They gradually increased the level of control of parts issue, until the assembling employee had to request and sign for a "kit of parts" from a warehouse clerk. Their cost of production increased, and the shrinkage only decreased a little. No matter how tight they made the controls, some parts were being stolen. There must have been collusion between different employees.
Then they tried a completely different system. They put 55 gallon steel drums in the manufacturing area and filled each one to the brim with one part. They abolished all tracking and controls. In the first week, some of the drums went down to 50%. Over time, however, the shrinkage (measured on a coarse scale now) has decreased nearly to zero.
I'm not sure if or how this can be applied to corporate bandwidth usage.
Amen to that, brotha. I work both the same job you have AND an office job. Young geek. I can't listen to MP3s or surf the net on my computer at work, but wtf would I want to? I'm at work to work.
lol, I apologise, Mr. English teacher... :) I was in the wrong.